The new hotel search site nekst has developed an innovative Big Data approach that allows for ultra-personalized hotel search, thereby drastically cutting search time from hours to minutes.
(TRAVPR.COM) GERMANY - October 27th, 2015 - October 27th, 2015, Munich –According to a study by global consulting firm Boston Consulting Group,the average leisure traveler spends over 13 hours to find and book the perfect hotel for his next vacation. The new hotel search site nekst has developed an innovative Big Data approach that allows for ultra-personalized hotel search, thereby drastically cutting search time from hours to minutes. “If nekst can gain some traction, it will add a much-needed voice to online travel” comments travel market expert Dan Peltier from Skift, the largest online news platform in travel.
nekst launched publicly today, timing the launch with its upcoming attendance at the Web Summit in Dublin, a yearly tech conference with over 30,000 participants. Selected for the event’s so-called “ALPHA class”, the team from nekst will showcase its product live at their exhibitor stand.
The idea behind the website was born out of the founders’ tiredness of spending hours sifting through endless lists of hotels on large hotel booking sites. When searching for hotels, most of the time is spent on reducing the “noise” in search results, that is, sorting out hotels that don’t fit to personal needs and taste, and creating a personal shortlist of hotels that do fit. “By using nekst, our users can create that shortlist in seconds and thereby cut search time drastically”, says Darius Abde-Yazdani, one of three co-founders.
“Personalizing travel processes is a hot topic in the industry and nekst has developed a unique approach with great potential”, says Martin Blöchinger, former Senior Executive at KAYAK/ swoodoo and the team’s mentor. Unlike other personalized travel sites that require a user to answer a set of questions or to explicitly type-in their requirements, nekst asks users to name a few hotels they’ve stayed at during past trips and loved.
“Our proprietary technology extracts the ‘essence of a user’s taste’ and finds matching hotels for any destination worldwide”, explains co-founder Dr. Florian Probst, who wrote his dissertation on algorithms. Sebastian Lehnerer has applied his experience in genomic data analysis to train nekst’s algorithm to recognize a user’s taste: “One of our main activities has been, and continues to be, aggregating public as well as proprietary data relevant to travelers for making hotel choices”.
About nekst:
Munich-based nekst was founded in early 2015 and has developed an ultra-personalized hotel search site that uses Big Data to tailor an individual hotel selection to each user’s taste. The team has raised €130.000 through a start-up grant issued by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and is currently in talks with investors for raising a seed investment.
###
